waugh!

It has been so long! Time to... cop out!

"Is it bad, Doc?" asked the patient, hiding his young fear behind a mask of barracks-room flippancy. "I have to be ready for a date by tomorrow night, you know."
Perkins looked up from his chart and tried to match his brave face. "We're not going to throw you on the scrap heap yet, soldier." Patting him on the shoulder, the medic stood up, his aching back cracking madly as it straightened from from his crouch beside the cot. "Get some rest, Johnson," he said lightly, knowing it was impossible advice. The tent was a dark mess of humanity, the drugged moans and screams of the wounded mingling in the air with the stench of sickness. Who could sleep in this hellhole? he thought, moments before answering his own question with an overpowering yawn.
"No rest for the weary, eh Perkins?" Dr. Jackson 'Hoss' Richards, took the clipboard from his hands. "What's the verdict?" he asked, surveying the symptom list grimly.
"Not good. Severe buildup of minutiae in the main conduit... pressure building up in the chambers behind. Definitely writer's block."
Hoss shook his head, his breath escaping in a hiss from between his teeth. He looked over Perkins's shoulder to the damaged private in the corner. "What a bastard of a disease. Boy looks like he's been running into a brick wall, over and over."
"There's no boys here," muttered Perkins, casting his tired eyes over the rest of the mangled occupants of Medical Tent A7. Who were these men who lay on these cots, dead and dying, shivering under the rough wool of the utility blankets? Whose sons? Whose brothers? Whose sweethearts? Had they dreamed, like himself, that war was a chance at glory and honor, a grown-up version of their battles in the backyard? How much of the shocked deadness in their eyes came from their wounds, and how much from their first look into war's cruel abyss? His father had always stood apart, had never wanted to tell him stories about his own time in the war-- he thought he understood that a little better now. His father, always so quick to criticize...
"Good God! Nurse!" Hoss caught Perkins before he fell and carefully lowered him to the ground, peering carefully into his glazed-over eyes and looking up with a grave expression. Nurse Hodgkins, a pretty little brunette just on the good side of twenty, dashed over and knelt next to him. Hoss looked at her sternly. "You've gone and forgotten to wash off all those archaic notions of gender again, Nurse Hodgkins. It's unsanitary, not to mention positively indecent."
"I'm sorry, sir! What's wrong with Jerry?" Her look at Perkins betrayed more than the usual affection for a patient. "Is he going to be ok?"
Hoss shook his head. "The damn fool has been working with a bad case of cliche, who knows how long. It's highly contagious, so we have to get him out and see to the others-- Nurse Hodgkins!"
The nurse shook her head violently, sending tears flying left and right. "Not my Jerry. Not my Jerry! I won't leave him!" she wailed, clutching at Perkins's uniform.
"Not you too! Marianne!" yelled Hoss, shaking her by the shoulders. "Pull yourself together! You have a duty to these men. You have a duty to Perkins. Morgan!" he called to the other medic in the tent.
She sniffed and set her jaw bravely. "What do you need, sir?"
He nodded towards bed ten and spoke low. "Johnson over there has a bad case of writer's block. I thought it was isolated, but if it's already showing signs of cliche... it's only a matter of time before it comes to a deadline. The cliche will build and build... until it degenerates into outright plagiarism."
"No," breathed Nurse Hodgkins.
"I'm afraid so. So get Perkins out of here, and you stay out too--we can't afford any more infections--"
A huge voice boomed from the entrance flap. "What in Sam Hill is going on here? Who's in charge?" A tall, wide man with a chin like a graveyard shovel shoved the canvas aside violently and strode in, shouting mightily at Hoss, who had jumped to his feet with a curse. "You. Just what do you think you're doing keeping my soldiers penned up in here, you quack? I need them on the lines!"
"General, these men are my patients and they can't be disturbed!"
"Hogswallop! They knew it wasn't a damn health spa when they signed up!"
Hoss was normally taciturn but in defense of his patients his ire was raised. "I won't stand for this, sir! You are putting my patients at risk of developing stereotypes and I want you out!"
"You! I'd like to see you try to shift a real man!"
Johnson groaned in agony behind them. Hoss stopped and clutched horrified at his throat, then turned with venom to the general. "Do you know what you've done?! You've brought your overwrought, excessively exclamatory dialogue in here with a sick man and now he's building up deadline pressure! Get out of my way!" The old doctor shoved the general out of the way and ran to Johnson, who was already starting to convulse. The general was shocked enough to stand quietly in the background for a time. "Morgan! Get over here!"
"I can't, sir!" cried Morgan, staunching a soldier's bleeding wound with the torn remnants of the unit's battleworn flag. "We're dealing with heavyhanded metaphor over here!"
Hoss held a hand helplessly against Johnson's head. "The deadline's here, and there's not a single thing I can do," he muttered, almost to himself, before sinking down to the floor. "Goddamnit, if only we had more time." He turned back to Nurse Hodgkins. "How is Perkins doing?"
She shook her head impassively. "I don't think he's going to come out of his internal narration, sir," she tried to reply, her voice eventually breaking. Hoss reached over and rested a hand on her shoulder in a vain attempt at comfort.
Perkins cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision-- he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath -- "The horror! The horror!"